


Without Pain

by Elektra Pendragon (elekdragon)



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Doctor/Patient, Episode Related, Frottage, Hallucinations, M/M, Masturbation, Missing Scene, Necrophilia, Spine - Freeform, Surgery, Wound Fucking, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 15:05:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2233476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elekdragon/pseuds/Elektra%20Pendragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While at Norfolk, Simon comes to depend on John as his savior and stability in a cruel and horrific environment. But does John actually have Simon's best interests at heart?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the flashbacks in season 2, episode 5. I had so many questions after that, but until we get season 3, we won't know for sure. Is Simon just hallucinating the Undead Prophet's voice in those flashbacks? Title from Wolfsheim's "Kiss the Wall," which I had going through my head the whole time I wrote this. I can't believe there isn't a ton of Simon/John fic. The way he called John's name...

In his mind, Simon always referred to the observation lab as the "Torture Room." If he were still alive, the experiments that John carried out would certainly be considered against every known law in the civilized world. But he was not alive, and Simon had volunteered for this. Better him than some nameless Rabid who had no way to know what was going on. It seemed... more humane, this way, to offer himself up in the hopes of a cure.

It didn't mean he liked it. It didn't mean he wasn't scared of what might happen--what he might /hear/--every time he entered this horrible space.

There was no pain, just the squelching of flesh and fluid as the scalpel cut into his skin. The squeak of metal hinges accompanied a distant pressure, and Simon was filled with the acute awareness that his back was now flayed open. A phantom memory of cold air passed over his skin, and in his mind he shivered. His body remained motionless within the restraints, his face pressed into the cushions that reduced his vision to a few shadows and the corrupted reflections of the men behind him, mirrored in the great freezer doors. 

John and Victor mumbled to each other in low voices. Simon might as well not even be there, except that it was his body, his spine, that they were examining. He tried to block out the noise, to not listen as metal scraped against bone and gloved fingers slid in black fluid. The brushed metal surface of the freezer door gave him nothing solid to focus on as things were done to his body.

The actual work was just pressure, not pain, but he didn't like it. It was too distant and disconnected. During these tests he felt as close as he had ever been to that blank, rabid state--seeing things happen to him, seeing himself doing things, even though he couldn't control them at all. John's experiments were beginning to feel like this more and more, as though he were returning to that not-dead state rather than becoming more like he used to be.

"I don't want to do this anymore." He wasn't sure he'd actually said it aloud, as the fleshy noise continued on without a pause. 

"You hear me?" Simon called out louder, focusing on pushing the words past his lips. The other sounds in the room paused, listening. "I don't wanna do this anymore!" 

The sound of picks and fingers and other things returning to press into his spine filled the air, a bone-scratching noise that reminded him of cockroaches in a cheap motel, making him feel dirty and disgusted. 

"Please?" he gasped. 

/Please, John? ...You promised./ 

It was nothing more than a blink to Simon's reckoning, but the room was dark when his eyes opened. Some time must have passed, but there was no way to tell how much. The voices and noises were completely silenced. The unrelenting pressure was still there, maddening, like an itch in that one place you couldn't reach. He huffed a noise as his wrists strained against the restraints. If he were alive, his fingers would be numb. As it was, they were no more or less full of feeling than they had been when John first strapped him onto the standing frame. 

The darkness was eerie, faintly phosphorescent with a sickly green tinge. It reminded him of Before, when these tests were being done to his mindless, hungry shell. The doctors back then had never bothered untethering him or putting him back in the cells with the others. It had just been safer to leave him trussed up like a prize hen. 

There was a noise, like someone fumbling in the darkness.

"Hello?" he called out. "Is someone there?"

/Please?/

A red light blossomed in the room, accompanied by a staticky-hiss of a voice that brought bright pain into his head. "Do you see now?" Searing electricity poured down his brain and through his naked spine, flowing with the fury of that voice. "The living have nothing to offer you but lies." 

A distorted shadow shifted in and out of the freezer's reflective surface, sparking another jolt through his body. He shook, breathing hard, hurting so much he was dizzy with it.

"They're desperate men with desperate schemes, and you do not belong with them. You belong with your own kind." 

Simon's eyes rolled up into his head, blocking the sight, blocking the red light that burned through his skin. The voice moved like lightning down his bones, escaping through the flayed skin as cleanly as the doctors' knives.

"Only then will you find salvation. Only then will you find peace."

The red light flashed away, replaced with the greenish gloom that rippled in his sight with bright aftershocks. The pain was gone with the voice, and with them both his strength had fled. Simon was filled with a great emptiness, one he hadn't known in many years. His gasps turned into sobs, and he thought once more, 'I don't want to do this anymore.'

There were footsteps in the silence, the brush of clothing loud against the ringing in his head. Simon held his breath, waiting for whatever new horror was to come. He didn't dare call out this time, afraid to invite that strange other voice to return. He darted his eyes left and right, trying to catch a bit of the person's reflection, hoping that it was one of the doctors, or even a nurse. 

A shadow rose up behind him, lumpy and indistinct in the freezer door. A pressure, light and hardly there, started at his shoulder, then flowed down over his arm before going back again. He didn't move. He didn't breathe. He just waited for what might come next as the pressure changed and grazed over different parts of his exposed body.

There was something at the nape of his neck, a different kind of pressure. A masculine hum rumbled in his ear, and then there were wet noises--first here, then there--moving all around his neck, his back. His spine.

The distorted shadow shifted in Simon's vision, spreading like a great bird before he was wrapped in pressure. He winced at the thought of his open wound being prodded again, but there was no pain, just a memory of suffocation that made him gasp in a breath. The soft, wet noises continued.

He knew this. He knew what this was, but his mind couldn't quite grasp the trick of it until the tie of his scrub trousers was loosened, the edge rolled down over his hips. 

Someone was on top of him. Someone was kissing his neck. Someone was caressing his skin. 

The rasp of a zip confirmed his worst thoughts, and then he was being moved, shifted in his bindings to a slightly better position. His vertebrae thrummed like a xylophone as something swiped through the muck and muscle of his open back, and then the air filled with wet sounds he knew as well as his own right hand.

/I'm going mad. Utterly mad./

Tight pressure on his shoulder--someone was leaning into his vulnerable form, pushing his face harder into the cushions. His view distorted, pulsing rhythmically. The shadows and light played games across the freezer door, leaping with the vibration of the tilted frame under the stranger's shuddering. 

A panic thought went through his mind, that he was being raped and couldn't even feel it. He had the sense-memory of a cock spearing his hole, unprepared and burning. His throat closed on a scream of frustrated fear that it was happening right now and he couldn't stop it, couldn't even fucking FEEL it.

But then the shadows sharpened, the dark reflection coalescing into the unmistakable outline of a man masturbating furiously. The shadow's arm was a blur of movement, hitting his body too high to be fucking into anything but the shallow wound of his back. The space around him was thick with panting, with wet slaps of flesh on flesh, of fingers colliding against lust-heavy balls. 

Yes, he knew this. 

Simon closed his eyes, squeezing them so tight that colored lights burst across his lids, the echo of the distorted voice striking like lightning across his spine. /"Only then will you find peace."/

Those whimpering sobs broke from his throat once more, making him feel utterly weak and powerless. 

"I don't want to do this!"

"It's all right, Simon. I'm back. You're all right!" 

"John," Simon breathed out, filled with gratefulness. He could feel the pressure of a hand on his bare shoulder, the friendly grip that Dr. Weston always used with him. It calmed him, pulling him out of a dark place where nothing made sense. 

"Sorry I had to leave you. We just had to deal with a little... ah, containment problem. Didn't think it would take /that/ long." 

Simon opened his eyes to a cool white light that sparked back the distorted outline of a person in a lab coat and suit. "John!" 

"Nothing for you to worry about," John continued, sounding a little breathless. "No one harmed."

"John," he said again, like it was a talisman against the miasma of insanity clawing at his mind. "John, John, John."

"Hush now. Let's get you cleaned up, then I'll get you out of that rig." Metal pinged against metal, and the pressure at his back seemed to ease just a little bit. "I probably should have sent someone to release you when it took more than a few minutes."

"Did you?" Simon gasped. "Did you send someone?" Had it actually happened?

"No, Simon. I didn't have the chance."

"Oh, John." Simon sagged in his bonds with relief. "Thank you," he breathed, barely shaping the words as the whisper passed his lips.

John's fingers pressed little spots around his spine, the touch a consoling counterpoint to the picks and scalpels from earlier. "Good thing, too, since you need a bit stitching up, first."

"Stitching" wound up having nothing at all to do with it. The area, John pronounced with a huff, was simply too wide for thread, so he used a medical stapler. There was a vague tightness in his skin, a pulling, but there was no pain as every ker-CHINK of the stapler pinned his flesh back together. Still, Simon flinched every time. John chattered on as he worked, but Simon couldn't follow the words. It didn't matter; the noise of it was familiar and soothing, generously escorting away the last dregs of his strange nightmare with polite yet meaningless patter. 

Simon knew it was impossible for his muscles to feel sore, but they were wobbly and ill fit to support his frame once John removed the many straps that had held him upright for so long. He sagged as he leaned back out of the face cushions, but John was quick to catch him, keeping him on his feet. 

"There now, just lean on me." 

John held him by the waist as Simon fought to reassure himself that his feet were still attached. He stared down at his dark-fluid-stained toes, frowning at the sight of them beside of the shiny crispness of the doctor's shoes. The steady pressure of John's arm was as soothing as his voice, solid and strong and above all, safe. His tan hand was strange against the pale grey of his stomach, those long fingers stretching out above the tightly cinched waist and sloppy knot of the dirty scrubs. 

A phantom spark of static buzzed at the base of his spine, and his knees locked with the effort to keep himself upright. Simon leaned forward into John's grip, relieved to feel the cotton-wrapped distant press of his hand.

"C'mon. Let's get you settled before you pass out right here."

Simon nodded vaguely in agreement, and shuffled his feet forward with John's pulling. He felt as bad as he had on the night of the Rising--shallow and empty and capable of only mindless momentum. They made it to the door centimeter by centimeter, John infinitely patient with him. A twinge of guilt pulled at the back of Simon's mind, as he knew how much these tests meant to John--to Simon's own kind. But he didn't think he had the strength to deal with them anymore. Sooner or later, he'd have to tell him.

Once they reached the portal, Simon sagged heavily against the wall so John could fiddle with the knob and prop the door open. He barely recalled that John had said something about a disturbance that had drawn him away, but he couldn't care about that now, not when escape from this terrible room was so very close. The doctor was uninjured, just a little rumpled. His lab coat was stained with black, his hair and shirt in disarray, his tie completely missing. When John turned back with a smile, Simon did his best to return it. 

John's eyes skittered down Simon's bare shoulder to his back. His smile dropped. "Eh, hold on." 

He passed the great chasm of the room in just two quick steps, and came back with a white flannel. "Just got a little..." Simon couldn't feel pain from the wound, just the sense-memory of childhood baths as John scrubbed the cloth across his lower back. Simon watched through slitted eyes as John shoved the grey-stained flannel into his lab coat pocket, the smile back on his face. "Fine as ever, Simon."

Simon just nodded, and gratefully leaned into John as he was led through the door and out of the Torture Room.


End file.
